The Concept Modeler can import a local ontology model into the concept model. Occasionally, an ontology file may contain references to external ontologies (i.e. ontologies not stored locally and not available to import directly into the concept model). An XML catalog (OASIS Standard V1.1) may be used to locate these external ontologies as a locally cached equivalent.

An XML catalog describes the mapping between external entity references and locally cached equivalents for an XML external resource. In this case, the external entity references are URIs to external ontologies, and the locally cached equivalent is a pointer to a local copy of the root folder containing the external ontologies.

For instance, the following entry from an XML catalog for the Red branch FIBO ontologies tells the Concept Modeler to look for the ontology named “http://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/red/be/” in the folder “be/be.rdf.”

<uri id="Automatically generated entry, Timestamp=1425183124824" name="http://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/red/be/" uri="be/be.rdf"/>

The local copy of this ontology is located relative to the root folder of the locally cached equivalent. This root folder must be set in the XML catalog file by modifying the “id” attribute of the element “group” in the XML catalog file:

<group id="Folder Repository, directory=file:///C:/Users/Jplatt/Desktop/FIBO-red/, recursive=true, Auto-Update=true, version=2" prefer="public" xml:base="file:///C:/Users/Jplatt/Desktop/FIBO-red/">

The identical, bolded file URIs above point to the folder “FIBO-red” on the Windows desktop of user “Jplatt.” These file URIs must be set to the location of the local folder containing the locally cached equivalent of the external ontologies. Windows users should note the use of forward slashes, as well as the triple forward slash before the Windows file location.

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